Remote disappointments

One more blog entry on remotes and then I'll move on.

My friend Steve took the Hauppauge remote that Judy gave me to his place and tried it out with a learning remote. He was able to report that the remote was generating a signal, so I'm assuming that it is functioning properly. He also took home the sensor that Judy gave me, but didn't have a equivalent system to try it in, so we don't know if that is working properly or not. My guess is that it is fine. It is my educated guess that the reason that I couldn't get the Hauppauge remote to function with the HTPC is that the Hauppauge software doesn't work properly with Vista or 64-bits or both. Whenever I opened the Hauppauge IR notification icon in the Windows Notification Area, I got a large mostly empty dialog box with one button. (I think that it said Close.) Anyway, I've uninstalled the Hauppauge IR program and moved on.

I went through the process of trying to program my new Air Remote to replace my TV's remote and that was pretty discouraging. There are quite a few remote codes for my TV and I tried them all, several times. I found a few that sort of worked, but of those, all of them could turn the TV off, but none of them could turn the set back on? (Huh?) I then tried to program the remote to learn the power button, but the Air Remote kept reporting that the learn mode timed out. I spent enough time on this to verify that I hadn't made any mistakes, and then I gave up. (I've never seen a universal remote that worked, and I guess I'm not terribly surprised by this one. Perhaps it will do a better job on my stereo or cable box.)

I agree with Steve on this subject: Bluetooth should be established as the common communication mechanism for all remotes, and a standard Bluetooth service should be established for remote controls. (There may be one already. I went to www.bluetooth.com, but that website is long on fluff and short on content. However, there is a promising article at www.bluetomorrow.com.